Every year or two, some young pup comes along and is told by his coach that he’s going to be the next Tomas Holmstrom. The player inevitably watches video of Holmstrom doing his thing in front of opposing teams’ goaltenders and assumes that emulating Holmstrom is enough. What they don’t tend to take into account are the subtleties that make Holmstrom one of the best net-front men this side of Dino Ciccarelli:
1. Holmstrom usually spends 10 to 20 minutes after every practice tipping pucks to make sure that his hand-eye coordination remains razor sharp;
2. Holmstrom actually scouts the goaltenders he’s about to face, watching video of them playing so that he can adjust his game to account for their stylistic tendencies, positioning, size and of course their levels of irritability. I would argue that Holmstrom’s probably a better-positioned goaltender than half of the league’s starting netminders;
3. Holmstrom also works very hard to retrieve rebounds and pass them back to his more highly-skilled teammates, to the point that his ability to chase the puck into the corner or behind the net corral it, shovel it to his teammates and then skitter back to the net may very well match his ability to screen goaltenders while attempting to tip 90-mile-per-hour pucks past them;
4. Holmstrom’s specialized equipment includes but is not limited to padding taped to the backs of his legs and ankles, protection for his lower back, shoulder pads that have almost all their padding across his back and shoulders, to the point that he almost looks like he’s wearing nothing but shoulder caps when you see him from the front, and of course extensive padding for his arms and wrists, as well as a stick that is short, incredibly stiff so that he can lean upon it like a “tripod,” and has a near-flat blade taped with one horizontal strip of black tape on each side of the blade, a trick he learned from Igor Larionov;
Continue reading "There’s yoost nobody like Red Wings forward Tomas Holmstrom, for sure"
Original Story:
http://www.kuklaskorner.com/index.php...
